---

New History Course Explores Role of African American Women in
U.S. History

History professor Mary Renda developed her new course, Race and Gender in North American History, after finding that even though her women's history survey course incorporated diverse voices, "it was hard to let all the voices have their full say." History 280 will now allow some of those voices to be heard for an entire semester. This fall, the topic is African American Women and U.S. History, and Renda plans to develop one or two more topics that also examine specific intersections between race and gender in the history of North America.

Markeisha Miner '99, an African American studies major planning to attend law school, describes the course as "a great class. It does a good job of incorporating women who have been studied and chronicled, such as Sojourner Truth, and ordinary women who haven't been studied. I'm excited about finally having a course that tries to tell the story from a different viewpoint. For example, we read an article that asked what George Washington's field hands were doing and thinking while he was busy founding the country. We also examine the diversity of African American women's lives in early U.S. history to get the full picture of their experiences."

Renda is currently revising a manuscript that deals with the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. "I have a background in U.S. women's history and got interested along the way in international questions, such as how gender might be relevant to understanding international conflicts and U.S. imperialism. I wanted to investigate how ideas about race and gender might inform the U.S. relationship with Haiti." Some of the materials Renda found in her research brought to light African American women's involvement in the Haiti issue, and from there Renda began to see the possibilities of a course that could explore the race-gender-U.S. history connection.

Key readings in the course include source documents such as letters and speeches, as well as three books: Gender and Jim Crow by Glenda Gilmore; Living In, Living Out: African-American Domestics in Washington, DC, 1910-1940 by Elizabeth Park-Lewis; and Ann Petry's novel, The Street. Renda says her goals for students are to transmit her passionate love of history, to have them see the historical perspective as a fascinating tool for understanding race and gender, and to come to see the history of the U.S. in a new way. "Even when students have studied the histories of people not understood to be part of the mainstream, they still view them separately. I'd like to see students integrate these histories."